Is it possible to write a custom converter for Pandoc?

Question

Is it possible to write a custom output writer for Pandoc? For example, suppose I want to convert a document: ``` pandoc -f markdown -t myCustomMarkup asdf.md ``` Does Pandoc have a way I can specify the conversion rules for `myCustomMarkup`? (e.g. I could specify that text that had the 'bold' attribute should map to `text`, and so on for all features/attributes that Pandoc recognises). Can anyone point me to some documentation as to how I can implement my own? I can't seem to find any mention of this. (Additionally, is there a way to "plug in" a writer defined in a file without having to (say) re-compile pandoc? e.g. `pandoc -f markdown -t myCustomMarkup --writerpath=path/to/my/writer asdf.md`)

Accepted Answer

There's no easy way to do this with current pandoc, but the next version of pandoc will contain code that allows you to write custom writers with a bit of easy lua scripting. (The code for this is already in the `master` branch in http://github.com/jgm/pandoc.) You'll be able to do

```
pandoc -t myfunkyformat.lua myfile.md
```

Here's an example of what a custom writer script might look like: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/blob/master/data/sample.lua

You can use the code now if you compile from source: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/wiki/Installing-the-development-version-of-pandoc

Is it possible to write a custom converter for Pandoc?

Solution

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